Nationalism

There is a particular sadness in watching two friends turn on each other, and a particular obscenity in watching a third party — the one who wishes them both dead — smile at the sight. That is what has come to pass, in the summer of 2026, between Poland and Ukraine. Not the familiar drama of Russia against the West, but something stranger and more disheartening: two allies, one of them fighting for its very existence, reaching back eighty years to open a grave. Poland’s deputy prime minister and defense minister, Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz — the leader of its peasant party — announced that Ukraine will have serious trouble entering the European Union so long as the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and its nationalists remain on its banners. One cannot, he said, raise onto a European pedestal those who destroy European cooperation; with Bandera, Ukraine will not enter the Union. And in almost the same breath — this is the detail that gives the game away — he added that Poland would not be handing over its MiG-29 fighter jets after all. History and weapons, fused in a single sentence. ...

There is a phrase that circulates in émigré chats and comment sections with the smooth confidence of a proverb: scratch any Russian, and underneath you will find an imperialist. It is offered as hard-won wisdom, the kind of thing only the war taught us to see clearly. I want to argue that it is wrong — not sentimentally wrong, not impolitely wrong, but wrong in a way that matters, because the mistake it makes is the same mistake the Nuremberg Laws made. I say this as someone who holds Russia fully responsible for this war, who wants Russia to lose it, and who feels the same instinctive recoil you feel when a Russian liberal starts explaining himself. The recoil is honest. The conclusion drawn from it is not. Russians are indeed an imperial people. But imperialism is a disease, and diseases can be cured. What it is not, and has never been, is a gene. ...

Whenever I am asked what should be done with Russia after this war, I notice that the question itself contains a hidden assumption I no longer share. The question assumes there will still be a Russia to do something with — a single, intact state, stretching across eleven time zones, that we will somehow steer toward decency once the present regime is gone. Replace the leader, hold honest elections, draft a good constitution, and the country will at last take the European path it missed in the 1990s. I have come to believe this is a comforting illusion, and a dangerous one. The hard truth is simpler and far less reassuring: an intact Russia will keep reproducing the empire, because empire is not a policy this state pursues but the form this state takes. You cannot reform your way out of a shape. You can only break it. ...

Notice what is never on the table. Every Western discussion of how this war ends circles the same small set of options — arm Ukraine a little more, tighten sanctions a little further, wait for the front to shift, or, in the worst version, lean on Kyiv to trade away land for a pause. What is never proposed, never even uttered as a thought experiment in the serious rooms, is the most obvious thing of all: that the war could be ended from inside Russia, by Russians, with Western help. The assumption that arming Russians against their own regime is unthinkable has hardened into a reflex so deep that no one notices it is a choice. It is a choice. And it is the wrong one. ...

Every war needs a founding lie, and this one has a particularly seductive one: that Ukrainians and Russians are “one people,” torn apart by malice and propaganda, who would fall back into a single embrace if only the troublemakers were removed. It is an attractive story because it dresses an invasion as a family reunion. It is also false, and not in a vague or sentimental way. History refutes it precisely. Ukraine and Russia did not drift apart in the twentieth century over politics; they forked in the Middle Ages, from two different roots, into two different civilizations. The man pulling the trigger believes he is correcting an accident. He is, in fact, fighting the conclusion of a process that was settled long before he was born — and, as I will argue at the end, he is now completing it against his own will. ...